


Big Iron, Steel Killer

by TerribleAndSadThings



Series: Godsend [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Glorified babysiter Arcade, Old World Blues, Platonic Relationships, REPCONN headquarters, Wang Dang Atomic Tango, platonic Arcade Gannon/Courier, side note really, tiny talk of throat slitting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-07
Packaged: 2019-05-19 04:29:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14866635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerribleAndSadThings/pseuds/TerribleAndSadThings
Summary: The Courier was scared of robots.It was the only explanation Arcade could come up with even if he couldn’t prove it.(can be read independently from the rest of the series)





	Big Iron, Steel Killer

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. what up, kids. aren't we excited for the next installment in this disaster? 2. Consider this another intermission from the main storyline. Not my best by far, but it sets up the plot of the next part nicely. Which is about halfway done. So either in 3 days or 3 weeks that'll be up. "Consistency" is my middle name, let me tell you. 3. the Courier is mostly an idiot. This is fact, but he learns. Arcade is not an idiot though he is in extreme denial about his role as de facto parental figure to the Courier. 4. the title is a loose reference to the 1940 film serial Mysterious Doctor Satan and of course Big Iron

The Courier was scared of robots.

It was the only explanation Arcade could come up with even if he couldn’t prove it.

The idea occurred to Arcade before. He sometimes speculated as to how the Courier obtained those scars. Granted, the Courier had a lot of scars, plenty Arcade had bore witness to, but not many like the one over his heart. He only had three scars like that, surgical, clean, precise. These three scars appeared after the first time the Courier vanished from the Mojave without a word for weeks.

When he returned, Arcade found him curled up in the Lucky 38, tangled mass of black hair shaved down to only fuzz and the scar circling his skull blatantly obvious. Even after months traveling together, it was the first time the Courier slept heavily enough not to wake with his presence. By the time he woke up, groggy and cranky, Arcade couldn't bring himself to ask.

The second scar Arcade noticed when a Viper managed to slash her switchblade the moment before the Courier fed her brass. Being he was the Courier and the Viper was a lowly human, the only damage she did was a slice through his shirt, but enough to display the scar over his heart, pink and fresh. If not for the first scar, Arcade wouldn't have thought much of it. The Courier got into fights more regularly than some people ate.

At the third, the concern Arcade worked so hard to repress came flaring. Of course, Arcade had been concerned about a lot of things at the time, for instance the young cazador the Courier was convinced he could capture alive. 

After shooting out its wings with two insanely well-placed bullets, the Courier pulled his shirt off from over his head. Arcade was so preoccupied with the scar running from the base of his neck down past his waistband he almost missed the fact the Courier was attempting to wrap the cazador in his shirt.

Not until they visited REPCONN headquarters did Arcade put it all together. As usual the Courier was a whirlwind of violence, but instead of the mad laugh Arcade had come to expect, he snarled. He placed each blow and every bullet with a brutal efficiency, as quick as possible and without the playful air Arcade had come to expect of him.

For someone who so adamantly avoided robots, the Courier displayed expertise at incapacitating and destroying them. After he smashed the last of the sentry bots to pieces, he stood over it, panting, more with anger than exhaustion. A growl escaped him between gritted teeth and then he let out a loud “fuck!”

Arcade blinked and then furrowed his brow. Looking him up and down, Arcade inspected him. “Did you get hit?”

“No,” the Courier snapped before stomping off in a seemingly random direction.

Arcade shook his head, but followed. Ahead of him the Courier muttered under his breath. From what Arcade could make out, it sounded as though the Courier berated himself.

“It’s fine,” he muttered, “they’re just fucking old world shit. It’s fucking fine. You do this all the time.” Louder, almost yelling, the Courier shouted, “fuck!”

“Courier?”

The Courier ignored him in exchange for climbing up the wreckage of the collapsed ceiling to the next floor. Although the Courier scaled it with ease, Arcade knew his limitations. Sighing, Arcade turned around to find the stairs only for the Courier to call after him.

“Where are you going?” Instead of the unreasonable amount of anger from before, the Courier’s tone sounded anxious.

Still wary, Arcade turned to face him once more. Sitting on the edge of the hole in the ceiling, the Courier looked down at Arcade with worried eyes and biting his lip.

“To find the stairs,” Arcade explained. “I’m not really looking to humiliate myself attempting to climb up that.”

“Oh.” After a moment of indecision, the Courier nodded. “I’ll come with you.”

Before Arcade could reply, the Courier darted down and skidded to a stop it front of him. After a second of Arcade fixing him with a skeptical look, the Courier ducked his head as if ashamed of his outburst before. Sidling closer, the Courier headbutted Arcade’s shoulder.

“Sorry,” he said in small voice. When Arcade didn’t reply immediately, the Courier nudged him again.

Sighing, Arcade relented and patted the Courier’s hair. Taking his chance, Arcade asked “what’s your problem with robots?”

"I just don't like them, okay?" the Courier mumbled. Drawing back, he hunched his shoulders and looked away. Absentmindedly, he rubbed the place over his heart with the heel of his hand, but he stayed beside Arcade, just as close.

“Does it have to do with the scar right there, and the ones on your back and head?”

Snapping his head up, the Courier stared at him, wide-eyed, before dropping his eyes back to the floor. Quietly, he admitted, “yeah.”

Arcade waited.

“They chopped me open and took my heart and my spine and my brain. I got ‘em back, but it really hurt. They made me do things for them and I had to fight a lot of robots.” He swallowed thickly, but when the Courier spoke again it was with savagery. “Killed them all. Smashed all their jars. Shot up all their brains.”

The Courier narrowed his eyes on the floor, bitterness etched in every line of his face. He jammed his hands in his pockets and jerked his gaze to Arcade. “I’m never going back to the Big Empty.”

It was bizarre. More than bizarre, it was wrong. The antipathy of his expression, the tension of his body, the strange steel in his tone that barely disguised the fear, none of it suited the Courier. Arcade hadn’t known the Courier could hate like that. Arcade hadn’t realized there was something in the Mojave that could frighten the Courier.

The Courier boxed with deathclaws and wrestled nightstalkers. The Courier tried to create a rodeo made up exclusively of big horners and feral ghouls.

It never occured to Arcade the Courier was capable of fear. Faced with something so unfamiliar, something he barely recognized, Arcade couldn’t be sure what to do. Still, he tried. 

“You don’t have to go anywhere you don’t want to.”

Arcade cringed even as he said it. Obviously the Courier didn’t. He said he wouldn't and Arcade knew better than most the levels of obstinacy the Courier possessed. 

Before Arcade could backtrack, make another sorry attempt at comfort, the Courier hurled himself against Arcade hard enough he stumbled back. Latching onto Arcade, the Courier clung to him in the semblance of a hug. Awkwardly, Arcade patted him on the back. 

“I love you, Arcade.”

Arcade barely made out the muffled words against his chest. Unable to repress the parental affection Arcade hadn’t known he possessed, he ruffled the Courier’s hair.

“Love you too, kiddo.”

Raising his head, the Courier turned his doe eyes up at Arcade. “Even when I shoot people?”

Arcade sighed. Reluctantly, he admitted, “even when you shoot people.”

-

Arcade watched the Courier as he shuffled from foot to foot, glancing between the terminal and the pod storing the soon-to-be sexbot. Then he stared down at the holotape in his hands with a look of concentration similar to the one he made when trying to gauge how angry Arcade would be if he shot his problem instead of talking.

After more than a minute, he looked up at Arcade with big pleading eyes and released a sharp whine.

"Arcaaaade, you do it." In an attempt to look pitiable, he stuck his lower lip out in a pout and sidled closer.

Arcade crossed his arms over his chest, unmoved. Any pity Arcade alloted for the Courier that day evaporated the moment he punched a ghoul in the face, mocked his eye, mugged him for his caps, and then took his clothes for the hell of it. Having a heartwarming smile and beautiful expressive eyes did not negate the fact he would gleefully murder pretty much anyone given the chance and less than half-decent excuse.

Like most buildings in the Wastes that the Courier liked to drag him to, Cerulean Robotics was filthy and decrepit. It came with the bonus of housing the most rats Arcade ever had the displeasure of seeing, aside from Broc Flower Cave which was full of giant rats and radioactive waste. Somehow the lack of radioactive waste didn't make him feel any better about the current situation.

"No, you're the one that agreed to play pimp for the Garrett twins, so you're the one who has to deal with the sexbot."

The Courier responded with another wordless whine and a gentle headbutt into Arcade's shoulder. Not making eye contact, he bumped the holotape into Arcade a few times, attempting to shove it in his arms. 

Arcade continued to stand stiff with his arms crossed. The Courier became more insistent, leaning on Arcade, pressing against him and still whining. Not subtle at all, the Courier tugged on Arcade's lab coat pocket and slid the holotape inside. With his task complete, he looked up at Arcade and beamed.

"If you don't take that out right now, I'm smashing it."

"Arcaaaaade," the Courier wailed. He twisted his fingers in the cloth of Arcade's sleeve and pulled in a poor attempt to drag him towards the terminal. "Pleeeeeeeease. You're soooo smart. I'll mess it up."

Looking from terminal, to the inanimate robot, and then to the Courier’s big pleading eyes, Arcade knew there was only one way this would go. He sighed.

“Fine.”

The Courier beamed.

=

The Courier didn't really fear death. Despite what Arcade thought, the Courier did understand what death was. He had a lot of experience with people and things dying around him, often him the cause of the dying. The Courier had plenty of experience with people and things trying to kill him. 

The whole thing was, they never could. So the Courier didn't worry about it. As far as the Courier was concerned, he was invincible until he did die. Since the Courier was invincible, there wasn't much he needed to fear. It's not like he'd die.

Robots, however, the Courier had a real problem with. It wasn't that he was _scared_ of them, the Courier wasn't scared of anything, but he didn't like them. In fact, the Courier hated them. 

Robots didn't have eyes. You couldn't look where they were looking or see the sort of shit that went on in their freaky robot brain. Somehow a pile of metal and electronics got to walking around shooting laser beams and talkin' like they were alive or some bullshit. They didn't sleep or eat. They didn't twitch or lean any which way. They acted like they were alive, but weren't alive at all. You couldn't trust 'em. You couldn't trust people either, but you could see inside people, in their heads.

Inside people were guts. The Courier understood guts. The Courier had guts that squirmed and got sick and wanted things and burned. Inside robots were circuit boards and batteries and empty places where the wants should be.

Robots didn't fear death either, but the Courier was pretty sure that was because they didn't know what it was like to be alive.

Not all robots were bad. The light switches and Muggy and all them were cool, but the rest needed to be blown to smithereens. 

The first time the Courier met Yes Man, he shot him twice. Yes Man said “ow!” and then apologized. The Courier didn’t really feel bad about it, but he decided Yes Man wasn’t too awful for a robot. He wasn’t all shady like Victor or an asshole like the Think Tank. Really, Yes Man wasn’t a robot. Yes Man was a person in a robot. “Man” was right in his name. 

Yes Man explained a lot of things the Courier didn’t understand and didn’t make the Courier feel stupid for asking. Besides, for as many awesome ideas the Courier had, Yes Man had a lot of great ideas too.

Mostly, the Courier appreciated someone taking notice of how great he had done cutting rat fink Benny’s fucking throat.

Cutting throats was an art, and now with Yes Man and a plan, the Courier would have a lot of chances to practice it.


End file.
